Sure musicians would love to sell albums, but those days are long over. Musicians don’t see squat from ticket sales except in rare circumstances. It’s mostly all guarantees and with live nation owning 100% of the music industry atm good luck to any artist actually going into points. How you can sell out a show and lose money is the most corrupt bs I’ve ever encountered.
- a bitter old tour manger
There is a catch though: venue merch fees [1]. Which may in turn explain why the merch is often crap: The profit margin becomes tiny if you need to pay the merch fee. So you need to choose between exorbitant prices (think $60 for a tshirt) or crap quality to make a profit.
*I hope this is an American thing, which would explain why on average it appears that American bands have worse merch than European ones.
[1] https://variety.com/2023/music/opinion/venue-service-fees-me...
The thing with shirts and sweats at least in the US is that most bands pay a premium to have them made. I’ve seen unit cost as high as 25 for shirts and 40 for sweats. Tack on shipping and theres not a lot of margin. Also bands have to price match with headliners. The venue fees are usually 10% on soft goods. Which is why posters are so lucrative. They kind of skirt by in the corner. Unless its a true indy band, meaning they press the music themselves with no label support, at best an artist can hope to make a dollar of maybe two off an album sale often times way less. Posters on the other hand, unit cost for a screen printed one are around $2. So for twenty bucks 18 is going directly to the artist. Get that thing signed or not and you’ve got an asset that will probably appreciate and not take up too much space in the process.
Of course if one is in a position to and one really wants to support an artist you should license their music or get your company too.